About Me

I was born April 11, 1959, so I'm more than a bit past the magical "50" barrier that makes me now officially old. I grew up in Park Ridge, New Jersey, which is a little suburban town not far from the New York State border. I dropped out of college after 2 years, having no patience for the forms of academia, but I am a voracious reader. I am currently working at Wal Mart as an electronics associate, and have finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I have gone back to school and gotten a BA degree in Mathematics, with the intention of teaching Middle School algebra and pre-algebra. I am married for eleven years and have a twenty four year old son, am a dilettante writer with a couple of unpublished short stories (viewable as posts on the blog) and a number of unfinished novels; I am a journeyman juggler, once bowled a 290 game, and am a generally talented all-around guy. (Ask anybody who knows me.) I am 5'8" tall, weigh a shade under 200 pounds (at least for the moment) and have dark brown hair that's going grey on those few portions of my head that still have hair.

Friday, December 19, 2008

A little perspective:

And it occurred to me that many people in this country might feel that the woman's refusal to remove her head scarf was much ado about nothing; why not simply remove it and be done with it, if security requires it? After all, we all have to take our shoes off to go through the airport security checkpoints, right? And while that's a nuisance, we all do it anyway.

But let's have a little perspective here: according to her culture, it is improper for a woman to bare her head in public. Asking her to remove her head scarf is roughly equivalent to asking a mainstream American woman to remove her shirt. We may find it hard to accept the equivalence; we may find it a very odd cultural taboo. But it isn't OUR reaction to removing headgear that is relevant; TO HER, it was essentially the same. If we would be appalled at a woman being cited for contempt of court because she wouldn't bare her breasts in public, we need to be appalled at this woman being so cited for refusing to bare her head. At least, we need to be equally appalled if we claim to believe in religious freedom and tolerance; to refuse to do so is to deny her religion the rights that more mainstream religions have of defining their own cultural taboos. If we are going to do that, we may as well scrap the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution and just admit that we don't REALLY believe in religious freedom & diversity except for those religions that are more or less like ours.